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Cave of Forgotten Dreams
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Genre | Special Interests |
Format | Multiple Formats, Color, NTSC, Widescreen |
Contributor | Erik Nelson, Michel Philippe, Jean Clottes, Maria Malina, Julien Monney, Nicholas Conard, Carole Fritz, Werner Herzog, Dominique Baffier, Jean-Michel Geneste, Wulf Hein, Gilles Tosello, Maurice Maurin, Adrienne Ciuffo See more |
Language | English |
Runtime | 1 hour and 30 minutes |
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Product Description
CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS, a breathtaking new documentary from the incomparable Werner Herzog (ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD, GRIZZLY MAN), follows an exclusive expedition into the nearly inaccessible Chauvet Cave in France, home to the most ancient visual art known to have been created by man. One of the most successful documentaries of all time, CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS is an unforgettable cinematic experience that provides a unique glimpse of pristine artwork dating back to human hands over 30,000 years ago - almost twice as old as any previous discovery.
Product details
- Is Discontinued By Manufacturer : No
- MPAA rating : G (General Audience)
- Product Dimensions : 0.6 x 5.3 x 7.5 inches; 2.4 ounces
- Item model number : 22969753
- Director : Werner Herzog
- Media Format : Multiple Formats, Color, NTSC, Widescreen
- Run time : 1 hour and 30 minutes
- Release date : November 29, 2011
- Actors : Gilles Tosello, Dominique Baffier, Julien Monney, Maurice Maurin, Carole Fritz
- Producers : Erik Nelson, Adrienne Ciuffo
- Studio : IFC Independent Film
- ASIN : B005HP2J66
- Number of discs : 1
- Best Sellers Rank: #11,655 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
- #139 in Special Interests (Movies & TV)
- Customer Reviews:
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The cave which contains the paintings was discovered by three French speleologists on December 18, 1994 in the Ardeche gorge in southern France. The cave is near the famous Pont d’Arc, a natural stone arch that spans the river, which is popular with canoeists and kayakers in the summer. I should know, I’ve been one on several occasions. The cave is named after one of the three speleologists: Jean Marie Chauvet. The cave is in excellent condition since its original entrance had been sealed off by a rock slide approximately 20,000 years ago. It was found by examining the air escaping from vents in the ground. The original access was through a hole that one person could barely squeeze through.
Herzog is again “clicking on all cylinders” with this film. The tonality of his narration exudes “wisdom,” and more importantly, so too does the content. Access to the cave is severely restricted due to the damage that humans can cause, deliberately at times, inadvertently, at other times, simply by their breathing. Herzog is able to obtain permission for his limited crew to film the cave, so that this important patrimony can be appreciated by all of us. The film is in English, and such is the universality of the language, that portions show French and Germans speaking to each other in English. In some cases, the English is dubbed when a French person is speaking.
The paintings are so fresh looking that their authenticity was originally questioned. Microscopic overgrowth that would take thousands of years proved that they were original. The most famous panel contains four horses’ heads. There are also lions, rhinos, and bison. There appears to be a minotaur, the partial body of a female, with the head of a bison. Unlike the paintings in the cave at Lascaux, there is virtually no use of color in the paintings. Herzog notes the efforts to depict the motion of the animals, including 8 legs on a rhino, a type of “protocinema,” as he calls it. Another fascinating aspect of the paintings is that some images overlay others, and via carbon-dating, they appear to have been made 5,000 years apart, longer than the time that separates us from ancient Troy. Archeologists believe that humans never lived in the cave; it was simply visited for ceremonial purposes. And it was much colder back then, with much lower sea levels that made it possible to walk from the sites of present day London to Paris, since there was no channel. “Global warming” must have been an aspiration to the painters in this cave.
Extensive mapping of the cave has been performed, via 127 scanner stations, involving 1800 hours of topography. At Lascaux, an amazingly realistic replica of the cave was built, so humans can tour the “faux” cave, preserving the original. I’ve toured it, and found the movie on how it was constructed to be utterly fascinating. Herzog mentions, in his movie of 2011, that a similar replica would be constructed for the Chauvet cave, and it was opened in 2015. Those many hours of computer mapping of the original had to be essential for the latter project.
The last few minutes of the film are the painted images, without sound or narration, an impressive way of stressing their significance in the silence of the caves. Once again, Herzog has produced a richly informative movie about one intriguing aspect of the world around us. 5-stars.
The other astonishment these cave paintings reveal is that 32,000-20,000 years ago, humans did not depict themselves. Only handprints of some are copied. These humans, like human babies, did not yet distinguish ‘me' from 'we'. They saw no reason to draw their selves, because their selves included the whole of living beings.
Perhaps today, in our mutual time of global climate change, and our still warring over national and religious identities, we can learn from our ancestors — see we to become me.
Dream with me…
There is a Cro-Magnon clan that camps near the cave. 5 or 6 blood-related families, totaling maybe 24 individuals. They have language, but not yet writing, still to come in 28,000 years. They have fire, now for 80,000 years, for cooking, heat and light after dark and in caves.
In this time, other creatures are kin. There is no separate superiority between humans and other mammals. All are beings. Preservation dictates relationship. Eat, or be eaten.
They all know the cave, and visit it, cautiously, because bears and lions live there. But, they believe, so do spirits, because the cave echoes voices and visions shadows.
One morning, the painter awakens. Is he a he, or a she? Likely, a he. Busy women don’t have the time to waste daydreaming. He has been contemplating the painting for months, its placement on a particular cave wall, planning its composition, practicing how to create art.
He enters the cave. Probably, not alone. He has an assistant, a companion to carry the torch to light the way. Arriving at the chosen site, he sets up his tools. Paints and sticks. He tells his assistant to hold the torch a certain way to light the uneven stone wall canvas. With charcoal sticks he has specially made, he sketches the outlines of four horses. Done for the day, his torches exhausting, he leaves.
He returns. He hand rubs on dark ochre paint detailing his sketch. Each of the four horses depicted is distinct. The lead is a stallion, driving his mare, and his colt, and his yearling. Each horse has a self.
Maybe, it took the painter many days to complete the painting. No doubt, clan members came to view the horses. No question, each clan member ascribed a different meaning to the painting. No different than a gallery showing today.
Then, after 7,000 years of visitors, a landslide sealed the cave entrance. A Thousand Two Hundred & Fifty generations borned and died before the gallery was viewed again in 1994.
This glimpse of a human’s past allows me to exist thru time. I am the painter, alive long ago. And the painter still lives …now thru me. This is proof of consciousness, on Earth, in this Milky Way, in the Universe.
Top reviews from other countries
Questi disegni fatti con i resti bruciati delle torce sono talmente belli per essere del 30.000 a.C. (dico 30.000 a.C.!!!) che viene quasi il sospetto che siano dei falsi... eppure mi risulta che nessuno abbia mai avanzato questo sospetto.
Il documentario onestamente è senza pretese ma basta che abbia raggiunto il suo scopo di divulgare a un ignorante questa meraviglia dell'uomo.
Efficace l'uso del 3D.
Insieme al "Delitto perfetto" di Hitchcock e a un documentario su Pina Bausch che non mi ricordo come si chiama credo che siano gli unici film non spazzatura in 3D. Chi ha altri suggerimenti scriva pure un commento
Language is complex, abstract, conceptual and symbolic. Sounds, as we know, are attached to words, which in turn represent meanings. Language arose as a means of communication for survival. It created community, unity, solidarity and protection. It formed invisible bridges between individuals, reducing their sense of isolation and loneliness. Language created what we call society, another word for our need to connect with others.
For 1.5 million years of our existence, the world was devoid of art. We saw beauty in it, surely, and this must have moved us in strange ways. But we didn't understand what the shadows our bodies cast meant. We hadn't learned how to give beauty back to the world. So the world, as yet, had no symbols in it.
But we know now how evolution by natural selection works. Contingencies occur, opportunities arise. A momentous shift occurred in the human mind somewhere between 50,000 and 40,000 years ago. Consciousness poised or primed the human mind for symbolic thought and conceptualization. When the breakthrough came art came into the world. Objects were no longer objects only. They became totems. They had meaning and magical powers. Among the first totems were the animals on whose existence we depended. Even if they frightened and threatened us, we revered them, as we came to realize we would die without them. Thus death and the future were also born. We crossed a conceptual bridge. We became existential beings. We created gods and religions to console and distract us, to take our minds off our end-fate — extinction.
The great French palaeontologist Jean Clottes speaks in this film. He says Palaeolithic man saw the world in two related ways. The world was both fluid and permeable.
Fluidity meant transformation between separate objects in the world was possible. Thus the head of a lion on the body of a man carved from the ivory of a mammoth tusk was not strange; it was normal, wholly plausible and acceptable.
Permeability meant no divisions existed between living things. The great unity was the spirit world where all things mixed, where everything interacted as one. Whatever man was he was not separate from the plants and animals that surrounded him, nor from the rivers, forests, sky, sun, moon, wind, stars and rain. He shared the world with cave bears, bison, elk, ibex, horses, lions, leopards, wolves, foxes, eagles, hawks, woolly rhinos and mammoths. He lived on the edge of ice surrounded by snow and glaciers. The skins, fur and feathers of the animals he ate also created his clothing, mittens and boots. Their bones gave him needles and fish hooks, and would one day give him music in the form of bone flutes.
Chauvet Cave was discovered by three amateur speleologists in December 1994. At the ground surface they detected subtle draughts issuing from the outcrop of a cliff. They realized a cave existed behind the rock wall. They removed rocks from the spot and found a narrow opening. The original cave entrance, we would later learn, had been buried under debris from a rock slide that happened thousands of years ago. This slide sealed the cave, making it in effect a time capsule. With the aid of a rope ladder the three spelunkers climbed down into the main galleries of the cave. Then with their head lamps and torches they stumbled upon one of the greatest discoveries in the history of human culture. On the walls of the cave they saw a zoological panorama of wild horses, ibex, bison, elk, woolly rhinos and other animals. They had travelled 32,000 years back in time.
The cave is located in the Ardeche Valley of southeastern France near the village of Pont-St.-Esprit. A natural limestone bridge called Combe d'Arc arcs over the River Ardeche near the site. The cave is sealed off to the public, locked behind a thick bank-vault metal door. Only a handful of scientists (archaeologists, palaeontolgists, geologists, et al.) have limited access to it. They have now mapped every square centimeter of the cave (1,300 feet in length) using laser technology. With this data a new replica of Chauvet will be built nearby for the public, as has been done with Lascaux Cave in the Dordogne region of central France.
Eccentric, charismatic, ambitious and half-mad, Werner Herzog wheedled his way into the French Ministry of Culture to gain access to a minister of culture there (who knew him by reputation and admired his films). This civil servant gave Herzog and three other members of his camera crew limited access to photograph inside the cave. Was he the man for the job? You can decide. What he brings is astonishment, awe and artistic imagination. The surfaces of the rock walls are uneven, which the Palaeolithic artists exploited to heighten the 3D effect of the animals. The camera promotes this illusion too. The images move in shadows as the torchlight dances over them. Herzog frames the views musically as well. He fills the soundtrack with choral singers, ghostly ancestral voices that reach us from the rock. Cello and piano notes also haunt the cave. The effect is spooky, as intended. Indeed, as even Jean-Marie Chauvet, the main discoverer of the cave, writes:
“Alone in that vastness, lit by the feeble beam of our lamps, we were seized by a strange feeling...We felt like intruders...We were weighed down by the feeling that we were not alone; the artists' souls and spirits surrounded us.”
The haunting will continue. We will always wonder what the art signifies. The conceptual world of our ancestors is not ours, so it is our mystery now. But that's all right. Gauguin used to say that we don't paint what we see in the world. We paint what we feel by seeing. It was the same for them. These vivid animals were not painted for someone's amusement. They were deliberately painted in the darkest, most inaccessible parts of the cave. Why? Because to see them wasn't easy. It meant confronting the darkness and going forward into it. In other words, it meant courage and pilgrimage, which indicates faith.
In one section of the cave a stone plinth rises from the cave floor. It seems to have been purposely positioned there. The skull of a cave bear, a species now long extinct, rests on top of the plinth. The snout of the bear points toward the former cave entrance, now sealed up. The skull has rested there for over 30,000 years.
Astronomers say the carbon atoms in our bodies and brains were incubated in stars billions of years ago. Think of that, if you will, and of that cave bear skull in Chauvet, the next time you look up at the night sky in wonder, fascination and gratitude. It is all so improbable that you are here.
Alors qu'il pourrait n'être qu'un banal documentaire, la grotte des rêves perdus est un pur Werner Herzog. Une merveille qui ne se contente pas de nous offrir des vues de cette grotte superbe et inaccessible, mais qui nous invite à rejoindre nos (pas si) lointains ancêtres, à revivre leurs émotions et à tenter de partager leur vision du monde.
Les scientifiques sont filmés sans complaisance démagogique; ils sont montrés dans leur réalité quotidienne, sans mise en scène mystificatrice. La science n'y dit que ce qu'elle a à dire, rien de plus. Elle propose une interprétation « objective » du site que le réalisateur met en relation avec sa propre reconstruction, subjective. C'est le parti pris de cette double lecture qui donne toute sa dimension au film et en fait une vraie œuvre de cinéma, avec une mise en perspective des visions réaliste et émotionnelle que vient renforcer une utilisation remarquable de la 3D.
Ne vous privez donc pas du bonheur de ce voyage dans l'espace et dans le temps avec le maitre du cinéma onirique pour vous tenir la main.